Are Accountants hoping for too much?

Late last year, the Legal Services Board (LSB) agreed that ICAEW should be a regulator of probate services and a licensing authority for Alternative Business Structures (ABS), subject to approval from the Lord Chancellor.

The ICAEW website (here) said that this is an important step by the LSB to open up the provision of legal services. In making this recommendation, the LSB has recognised that consumers can receive legal services from appropriately regulated ICAEW Chartered Accountants that are of equal quality to traditional providers: in other words, lawyers.

ICAEW is now working to provide support and advice to accountancy firms interested in providing probate services and becoming ABSs. You can expect that the first batch of applications will be approved in Spring 2014.

Opportunities for ICAEW Chartered Accountants include:

allowing new business structures between lawyers, accountants and other professionals (such as IFAs); and

allowing accountants to provide reserved legal services which were previously restricted to lawyers.

With Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) emerging every five minutes or so in the legal profession, you can understand Eduardo Reyes asking Can accountants change the legal sector? See Law Society Gazette article here. He recalls the impact accountants had the last time they took aim at the legal sector when it was widely assumed that being both bigger than lawyers, and closer to clients through ongoing audit and consulting activities, the accountants were a huge threat. But it wasn’t. Nor did the advent of US law firms in London make much difference.

So, will it happen this time?

Nearly 6 years ago, with a lawyer colleague, I first looked at the idea of accountants working on probate work. We concluded that accountants doing probate work need the following and much more:

Martin Pollins is a Chartered Accountant with wide experience in corporate finance and business management. He holds a number of directorships and has served on the boards of several companies, including those listed on the London Stock Exchange, AIM and OFEX.

He was a Council member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales from 1988 to 1996.

Martin Pollins ran his own firm based in Sussex and was the first Accountancy firm in the UK to advertise on television and Martin went on to create and launch the CharterGroup Partnership (the UK's first Accountancy network) and then LawGroup UK (one of the largest networks of lawyers in the country).

Martin started work on the Bizezia concept in 1996, developing the broad range of information resources and products over the past 18 years.